I’m going to be speaking at Solid in San Francisco, May 21-22. (That also means I’m in San Francisco from about the 19th of May – drop me a line if you’d like to meet up).

My talk is called A Lamppost Is A Thing Too:

“Connected Object” brings to mind white consumer goods with an Ethernet sockets or Wifi antennas. But that’s a narrow way of thinking that’s perhaps unhelpful: whatever you may think of the term, an “Internet of Things” should embrace the diversity of Thingness.

Perhaps a better model for understanding what connected objects can and could be is the furniture of a city. It’s public, shared, and represents a relationship not only with an object but with services or infrastructure. Connected Objects aren’t just going to be devices we own: they’re going to be public objects we share. And they can’t just work with bespoke apps for niche smartphones: public Connected Objects will need to be far more democratic in their technology choices.

So: a bit about Things; a bit about Hello Lamppost, and how it’s not just a charming/playful art project; a bit about what Things can be, and on Connected Civic Objects. Perhaps a new demo of work in progress. It looks like a great lineup: perhaps see you there.

A week of being head down. Primarily, on Contributoria: working up lots of new templates and a new workflow, discussing this with Dean and solving a lot of problems; fixing a few issues and deploying the new features.

When I wasn’t doing that, I spent an afternoon poking some electronics for a project I’m calling Hutton. Most of the time was spent with an Electric Imp, and I was really impressed with the out-of-box experience: not too long to get it connected, and with some canniness, there’s a lot you can do. It’s certainly a very responsive platform, and I can see myself using it a lot in the future. Otherwise, I was mainly soldering headers onto devboards and just poking some libraries. I hope to return to Hutton in week 71 – both the web-end of things, a browser-based prototype, and then rigging up some components that were befuddling me last week and seeing if a physical demo is possible.

And, in amongst all that: the usual tranches of email and planning, which never get faster.

Oh, and I almost forgot: we got to announce that Hello Lamp Post had been nominated for Designs of the Year. Needless to say, Ben, Sam, Gyorgyi and I are all very proud.

I’m delighted to be able to announce that Hello Lamppost, which I worked on with PAN Studio and Gyorgyi Galik as the inaugural winner of the 2013 Playable City Award, has been shortlisted in the digital category for Designs of the Year 2014.

It’s great company to be nominated amongst – Bare Conductive, Citymapper, and Oculus Rift to name a few – and we’re looking forward to showing Hello Lamppost off in the awards exhibition, from March 26. Rather exciting.

Back to the swing of things after a week away.

That primarily meant getting back in to Contributoria: adding some small features on the back-end, tracking down various snags, and getting up to speed on where the codebase was after a month away.

I also spent a day mentoring as part of the ODI’s Open Data In Practice course: feeding back on various exercises the attendees were completing, as well as helping them in their own personal exercises, writing code that went beyond their levels of experience. By the end of the day, there were some great presentations, and it’s always a delight to help people come to new understandings and see what’s possible with the information they have.

In amongst all that: various meetings, lots of thinking, and lots of getting back to velocity for what now feels like 2014 proper.

I’m going to be speaking at the Random String Symposium on March 7th, in Coventry. There, I’ll be talking about Technology as an Artist’s Material:

Here’s an idea: technology – technologies – are not only tools. They are also materials. To make art with a material, we need to be conversant in it, aware of its capabilities. And these new materials are not all tactile, physical; the materials of the digital world are as much immaterials.

How do we develop that familiarity? How do we understand the grain of a material that we may not be able to feel? How can we sketch in technology?

Let’s explore, briefly, what technology can be when considered as an artist’s material.

It’s familiar territory if you’ve seen me speaking about materials or sketching, but it’s a new talk aimed at a slightly different audience – it’ll be nice to talk about practice in the artistic space, and perhaps use some different points of reference to normal. Regardless: looking forward to it. The full schedule is on Lanyrd.

Nothing to report; off travelling! Back to normal for week 69.

Update: everything’s back to normal. Has been for a while, in fact.

Long story short: my email’s down for a little while. Shouldn’t be permanent, and if you’ve sent me something to my infovore.org account, it’ll arrive once that queue clears. But in the meantime, I’m incommunicado (and my personal site is of the internet.)

Lessons learned so far: 34sp have lovely telephone support; keep your domain’s contact details up-to-date….

I’ll let you know when contact is resumed.

Busy, scattered week, this.

Much of it was taken up with Botley – another productive meeting to work out where to devote the team’s energies, and then a day and a half of poking and prodding an API, building a tiny prototype to share some thinking with the team. Not a product in the slightest, just some sketching-in-code to work out the limits of systems and help us design them. I hope it’ll be useful to the team.

Not much on Seager to report – just a few last teething troubles to tidy up.

I had a fascinating meeting on Wednesday, which has led to a tiny proposal, for a project I’m calling Butser. It’s for a lovely client, with a really interesting problem, and could turn out to be a nice meaty-code-problem to keep me busy if it comes off. For now, though, we’re aiming to start small if we can get the funding. Definitely worth the time meeting up.

On Thursday, I went to a workshop organised by CDEC around what a Connected Products Studio – something they have a mind to creating in London – might entail. A rich, involved day, with a great room of expertise from small companies and technologists through to funders and facilitators; many thanks to Alex for organising and facilitating the programme.

And then, on Friday, I moved studio. I’ve been renting a desk from Makielab since I went freelance, and I can’t thank them enough for their hospitality. But needs change, and so I’ve moved into PAN‘s studio space. They’ve been good friends for a while, and have a space really suited to the shape a bunch of my practice is taking. I’m still in East London, of course.

A busy week and a bunch of moving. Week 68 I’m taking off – heading to the hills and having a bit of a retreat. I’ll be back for Week 69.

Pulled in lots of directions this week:

• A day wrapping up the month’s work on Contributoria/Haddington, laying the foundations for Dan’s work for the rest of the month.
• Paying my tax bill.
• Various meetings and lunches with friends, about interactive theatre and games culture, which were a nice tickle for the brain.
• Wrapping up a final set of bugfixes on Seager, which led to the startling discovery that 3G connectivity providers may will strip websockets from port 80 because of their lousy proxies – we lost some time to that one.
• A day of workshopping for the BBC on a project that I’m calling Botley for my references.

Fun, though: two concrete days at either end, and lots of little bits in the middle, tidying up and poking some other bits of technology in my spare time. One potential project has fallen through for the time being, though thankfully this isn’t too much of an issue; a couple of speaking engagements have emerged. Lots of focuses, then, but a solid week. One more like that, and then I’m heading to the hills for a week’s R&R.

The majority of the week was spent working on Contributoria (Haddington), following its launch the week before. No major errors to fix, but lots of features to roll out ASAP. It’s very much an “early” beta (rather than a perpetual beta) and we’d like to get the features people are expecting into the product as swiftly as we can; I’m hoping by February/March I’ll be focusing more on polishing and plussing, than on crawling through the critical backlog.

So that meant building core functionality, helping Dan set up outbound email, fettling servers, and getting our deployment tools polished and working for all of us. That went smoothly, and we’re now delivering at a nice pace.

A Monday spent at the Guardian offices also meant that we could show the product off in an editorial meeting, and we had a decent response – some sharp questions and good feedback. At this stage, almost all feedback is helpful, and it was nice to get a response direct from all the journalists on tap in those offices.

I also spent a little of the week debugging some issues with Seager, primarily around latency. Connected object need a degree of polish in their mere implementation to file off rough edges, even in this early prototype: how often they report to the network, what first configuration feels like. Lots of that’s been ironed out, and I’m going to talk more to the Bergcloud team next week about my experiences with the project.

And of course, handling email and inquiries about the future – and lining ducks up for the tax payment deadline.

Very quiet over the Christmas break.

That meant there was time to write this year’s Yearnotes, which put a lot into focus, and reminded me how much to be proud of this year there was. If you missed them over the holiday period, they’re probably worth your time.

On the first of January, Contributoria went live. This is the project I’ve been referring to as Haddington. I’ve written more about it here; suffice to say, it’s early days, and whilst I’m not hugely instrumental in the work, I’ll be continuing to lend a hand for a little longer – tightening various screws around the place. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops.

To that end, I spent the 2nd diving back into the project. On the 3rd, I largely wrapped up the work on Seager – the connected object prototype – and shipped it off to the client to see how it suits them.

Week 65 is when we begin again in anger: a few meetings, and a whole week on Haddington/Contributoria. Onwards, into 2014!

Contributoria is a community funded, collaborative journalism platform. It allows journalists to propose stories – along with how much it’ll cost to write/research them – and a community to back those proposals, follow them through to publication, and offer input.

Sarah’s written more about the project as an introduction to the first issue, explaining some of the goals and the business and publishing models for the platform. T

I came on board the project quite late, as a second pair of hands, to translate Dean‘s designs into front-end code, and start integrating them with Dan‘s back-end. I’m continuing to have some involvement at that level for a little while after launch, too; there’s still work to be done! But the seeds are sown.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Contributoria grows – its very much a ‘live’ project at the moment – and it’s been exciting to play a role in it, however small, at its inception. And, of course, an excellent team to work with – thanks to Matt, Sarah, Dan, Dean, and all the writers who’ve already joined in.

(This project was also known as Haddington around these parts.)

Weeknotes are indexed from zero. So are yearnotes, then.

Last year, I wrote yearnotes on my personal site. This year, it’s time to start them professionally, too. So even though these aren’t the first ever yearnotes I’ve written, they’re the first professional ones. So we’ll call this year[0].

It’s actually 14 months since I started freelance life, and “write yearnotes“ has been in my to-do list since September. Now it’s the Christmas break, there’s time to clear my head and think about what those notes might be.

How have things gone? Well, I think. I’ve certainly maintained the breadth of work I wanted to cover: from architecting and engineering reasonable-scale web/software projects, to more creative, esoteric one-off projects in more diverse materials. There’s been a nice balance of both, and I’m not sacrificing one for the other.

There’s been a nice range of clients, too: large corporations, small companies, some grant-funded work, and some creative work with no client, like the RSC project and my collaboration with Jeff Noon.

And it’s not just been engineering: there’s also been a healthy amount of pure interaction design consultancy, and some workshops.

Three nice pillars for the year, then: design, engineering, invention.

As well as a diverse range of clients and projects, there’s been a diverse range of materials to work in: some very familiar, some new. For instance, software languages I’ve worked in (by which I mean: worked for a client, for pay, in) this year were Ruby, PHP, HTML/CSS, Javascript/JQuery/D3, Coffeescript/Node, Java/Processing, C/Arduino. I think that’s it. And on top of digital materials, then also: the web, electronics, wood, plastic, paper, embedded electronics, telephony.

It wasn’t all abstract ideas and prototypes; several projects were deployed and maintained at a decent scale; one installation held up to repeated public interactions throughout long viewings. Hello Lamp Post in particular was a great success: thousands of players over two months in the summer, a widely enjoyed project, and super-visible; a real honour to get the chance to create it.

I spoke at a variety of conferences and events; most notably, Webdagene in Oslo, Wearable Futures in London, PlayArk in Cardiff, Improving Reality in Brighton. New material at all of them, along with demos or illustrations of new work at each; it’s always good to not be trotting out the same material each year. I mentored some course attendees at the Open Data Institute.

And: shipped a lot of projects. I need to finish up the portfolio page on this site, but it’s been great to keep up weeknotes and remind myself on the quiet weeks – which are really always the busy weeks in the studio – that I’ve achieved a lot.

Lots to like, then. And it all met one of my major goals when I started out: that the work had to be sustainable. By which I mean not just financially, but also mentally. Last January was a bit rocky, but by and large, it’s been sustainable in all the ways I hoped.

There’s no great story about exponential growth here; there’s no remarkable start-up idea, no evidence of anything that resembles “growth hacking”. And it’s not always work that will change millions of lives; I was never going to be curing cancer. But: it is good craft, good work. There is value beyond flipping into millions of dollars of income. A lot of my work has made people smile, or think, or respond in their own work, and those are just as valuable actions to encourage as spending money. I’ve made some art, and I’ve made some functional work, and I’ve done a lot of imbuing one with the spirit of the other. I think that will continue: why can’t we have good commercial projects that are charming, delightful, and thought-provoking? Why can’t we have creative work that really follows through on its haeccity, on not just being a vague notion but a working artefact? Questions to keep thinking about in 2014.

What did I find hard? As I expected, managing risk. I’m not a risk-taker, and so found fallow periods expectedly frightening – and sometimes rushed into decisions through fear of having downtime. In fact, what this usually meant was that space for my own projects was always pushed away. Next year, I’m going to calendar in personal projects more aggressively, and give myself the respect I give a client. I note looking at last year’s notes the number of personal projects – but also remind myself that many things I took on this year overlap into that territory. Work is now this sort of thing too, so I shouldn’t feel disappointed. Also, I still have a few other things to write up – including ghostme, a project I’ve spoken about but not properly described online. I’ll try to rectify that soon.

What did I learn? The sort of scale of things I like – I tended to be very cautious and not want to commit to things that were too long, but I would always inevitably find that once I was into a project, it never felt long enough. I’m still not one for big contracts, but am learning that three months (rather than two) is a nice “decent length”, and one month is never as long as you think.

I learned that risk is not just financial; there’s also risk within projects, that needs to be managed – not just the risk of the components of the project, but also of it affecting other work (which I of course have to bear myself).

I learned how to trust my gut – what to pay attention to, what to ignore. I am beginning to learn how to feel confident about the things I’m actually good at – I understand what experience really feels like, and I need to remember not to be too shy with that.

And I learned how much I like being busy, and being productive. Whilst freelance life can be hard, some of my happiest days were the ones where I had my head down, comms management offloaded to one side, and spent a day thinking and making (the two are usually the same): hunched over a soldering iron or neck-deep in Javascript. They were often tough days, but the fiero at the end of them was huge, and it was worth clearing the decks for them. Being more in control of meetings – fewer, more productive ones – has been good for me.

Tips I’d pass on to other people, based on my experiences: primarily business ones. Calendar in your own personal projects or you’ll never do them. Sales on a Beermat is a useful reference guide to something you might not have done before; if you take anything away from it, it’s the way it sets up a Pipeline. My Pipeline hasn’t been touched for a while – it’s been static for a bit – but it was great early on to have visibility on what might happen. I learned everything I needed to know about accounting – well, almost everything – through Freeagent. I filled in a lot of blanks, it taught me how self-assessment worked, saved me a bit of money, and was great for tracking time, invoices, expenses, and estimates. One of the few pieces of software I still evangelise about. I also got a real accountant, who, whilst they didn’t have much to do (thankfully) still saved me roughly what they cost, and is now a contact to have. Get an accountant, no matter how little they do for you or how little you spend on them.

And keep weeknotes. Yes, they’re a bit of a pain to write, and I never know when to do them – Friday night? Monday morning? It usually happens on Sunday night, for reference. Their value is not in the week-to-week: it’s in seeing the big picture a few months later, understanding the patterns of your work. I’ll keep this practice up.

What’s in line for next year?

More. More design, more engineering, more invention. I’ve got a few small projects ticking away, and some consultancy on the horizon. I’m taking a holiday in January. I’ve got a bit more mentoring at the ODI, and am continuing to think about more ways to teach, because it’s a subject important to my heart, and it’s something I like to see done well – and a thing I love doing. I’ve got a few interesting pitches and proposals that I’m waiting to hear more about, and which I’ll be able to talk more about in the New Year if they come off. I’m going to calendar in time for self-initiated projects – some web-based stuff, some games, I think. I’m going to continue to be available for work, and if any of the above – software, connected objects, interaction design – feels like a fit, do get in touch.

Year[0] has been very good to me. Here’s to Year1.

Last working week of the year.

Two days on Haddington, tightening a lot of screws and getting ready for January’s launch. I’ll have more to say about that in the New Year, I’m sure.

A meeting on Tuesday about a potential arts project. Likely I won’t be able to take it – but still worth spending an hour to help potential clients understand their problem better. Even if it doesn’t make my brief better, it will help somebody else’s, so it’s worth my time.

Seager has had a bit more work: producing a first draft of the documentation, making the web experience a bit smoother, tidying some rough edges. It’ll wrap up early in the new year.

And on Tuesday, a copy of Maker World arrived with a feature on the Literary Operator. Really proud of this – it’s came out well, and I’m glad it’s a project people respond to so well.

A few other things happened that I can’t really talk about until 2014, but it was a very good week to end the year with.

Today, I’m closing up shop until 2014, when the year begins in earnest – some consultancy, the public launch of Haddington, and for me, some time off and personal work, I think. I’ll speak more about all that soon.

Next on the list: writing Yearnotes, on the first 15 months of self-employment. They might arrive next week.

I’m pleased to announce that The Literary Operator was featured in issue 1 of Maker World magazine – alongside lots of other great connected objects and technological art projects. Thanks especially to Kirsten for the excellent interview – despite being featured in a magazine about Maker Culture, it was a delight to spend so long talking about Queneau, the Oulipo, and the artistic ambitions of the project.

Most of Week 61 was spent on Haddington. Monday was spent onsite with the rest of the team, finalising the plan for the next few weeks, and building a few features that required some collaboration. The rest of the weeks was spent polishing of templates and interactions.

On Tuesday, I spoke about Cities As Platforms at Wearable Futures, which seemed to go down well – and the rest of the conference looked super-interesting. It was a shame I couldn’t stay longer, but Haddington called.

In around that, I fitted a tad of Seager in around the cracks, pushing forward on implementation, and bringing it close to an end-to-end prototype.

Next week’s the last week in the studio until 2014; I’m going to be working pretty much til the end of the week, focusing on Haddington and Seager.

Lots of things happening this week.

Primarily, a bulk of work delivering pages and functionality for Haddington. That took up most of the first half of the week. Work on this paused a little whilst I waited for the back-end code to move ahead, at which point it’d become clearer what front-end work was a next priority.

In the time that opened up, several new pieces of potential work emerged and began to be planned:

• Claife, a pitch for some research funding into connected objects; I’d be acting as a technical advisor and building out some of the functionality, as well as assisting in the design, if that comes to fruition.
• Botley, which will likely begin as some design workshops in the new year, before possibly turning into interaction or functional prototypes – we’re going to play things by ear. But for now, some workshops with a diverse group, looking at media products.
• Seager, a tiny project: helping an in-house R&D team at a company prototype a connected object.

Seager is already underway, and is proving to be as exciting as it is enjoyable. I spent some spare hours on Friday pulling together various strands with a breadboard of components, a bunch of Ruby and just enough C; progress came surprisingly fast. Really good fiero.

I also wrote my short talk for Wearable Futures: I’ll be speaking as part of the Wearable Cities strand, and talk a little about Cities as Platforms. That’s next Tuesday.

A good week, then: lots of things moving forward and some super-interesting work on the horizon. Next week, when I’m not at Ravensbourne, back to Haddington in earnest.

Just one day on Haddington, building forms and refining some of the interactions with them.

I spent a bit over a day on Housedon, rebuilding one page that had caused some issues, adding the last remaining feature, and hopefully bringing that in to land – whilst trying to stop the feedback loop from sprawling too much.

On Wednesday, I had a meeting with a potential future collaborator; I mainly ruminated about the design of connected objects.

Otherwise, though, not a lot, owing to being under the weather. It’s hard being ill when you’re freelance – I’ve managed to largely avoid it so far, but the cold weather got me, I think. Fortunately, it was a quiet week, and so not the worst time to fall ill – the only thing that fell by the wayside were my plans for personal projects. Still, hoping to shift the last remnants as I move into Week 60, when there’s less time I can afford to lose.

The majority of the week was spent on Haddington, focusing on some particularly gnarly Javascript for rich front-end interactions, working with Dean on confirming what various interactions should feel and work like, and meeting up with the editorial team to discuss requirements for writers.

On Friday, I spent a day at the ODI, acting as a mentor on the last day of their Open Data in Practice course. I spoke to the participants throughout the final day – which is largely dedicated to ‘making’. In particular, I helped a few of the groups with their work, discussing appropriate object design, and assisting with some CartoDB prototyping. The presentations at the end of the day were great, and it was as ever, always interesting to see how different people learn and think.

Not much to report; this week was spent plugging away at Haddington and seeing the team for a couple of days, which was very useful, if only to stop cutting code and use face-to-face time with one another to understand some of our assumptions.

I also put the transcription of my talk Driftwood online, which appears to have been well received. (And: as is customary every six months, patched up my Keynote Exporter tool to reflect current usage.)

Quiet, but busy.